40,000 theater tickets have already been sold for this Saturday, March 16. “And this figure is already a record, if we compare it with previous years”, declares the president of the Association of Theater Companies of Catalonia (Adetca), Isabel Vidal. This Saturday, the first call for the “No empty seat” project will be held, an initiative with which the theaters of Catalonia want to fill all the rooms, in a kind of “Sant Jordi del teatre”.
A month earlier, on February 16, the counter was launched that reports the sale of the 60,457 available tickets from the theaters that have joined the initiative. “It is the first year and there have been rooms that have not been able to be added, but we trust that next year there will be many more seats”, says Vidal.
In this first edition of “Cap butaca buida” 145 theaters from all over Catalonia have signed up, and in the long run the aim is to get all the professional theaters in Catalonia to be 100% full one day a year.
The website Capbutacabuida.cat reports on these 40,000 tickets already sold, which represent two thirds of those available. Vidal explains: “There are rooms for which we do not have data and there are also a few that do not do advance sales, that will open the box office on the same day and, until then, we will not know exactly how many seats will have been taken”. The website also offers a service to buy tickets, in addition to the websites of each theater and the usual channels.
The president of Adetca explains that sales started with a thousand seats a day and that this sale has grown exponentially, which is why she considers the figures to be very good: “We are aware that in this first edition we will not reach one hundred percent, but falls within the forecasts”.
There are theaters that have done promotions, special functions and even parties, but this time there is no general discount. Looking ahead to future calls, Vidal says that they are working to find more incentives and more activities, so that this day is marked on the calendar.
The margin is still wide, up to the 148,000 seats in the theaters that schedule regularly. Because this is another feature of the campaign: promoting professional theatre, which has three thousand performers in Catalonia.
2% of the revenue collected on March 16 at the theaters participating in the “No empty seat” initiative will go to the Clowns Without Borders festival. The data center is in charge of the Work Center of the Multiple Sclerosis Foundation. Next year, “Cap butaca buida” will be celebrated on March 22, 2025.
